Month: March 2009

Letting add-ons perform work during install and uninstall

One of the biggest requested items I see in the add-ons newsgroups and IRC channel is from developers asking how to perform some work when their add-on is installed or uninstalled. Previously it has been vaguely possible to do this, but there is a lot of hassle involved and it wouldn’t always work right.

As part of my roadmap for improving the extension manager we are talking about adding real support for these sorts of activities. The draft specification covers the proposal in more details but in draft it allows the following:

  • Add-ons will be able to provide code to run when their add-on is installed, uninstalled, disabled, enabled or upgraded.
  • Add-ons will be able to provide a list of files in the profile folder and preferences to be removed when the add-on is uninstalled.

There are a few restrictions so if you are interested check out the full specification and let me know what you think. There’s still room for change, but I think the proposal provides real benefits for add-on developers as it stands.

What’s up with the extension manager?

Some time ago (wow was it really 5 months!) I blogged about some plans I have had for the future of the extension manager. I think it’s time for a short review of what it going on.

I said at the time that any of the timescales mentioned we’re very rough and certain to be underestimates, but I didn’t quite appreciate how true that was at the time. Despite tripling most of the times we’re still almost nowhere along implemented most of the ideas.

The main reason for this is simply the delayed launch of Firefox 3.5 (previously 3.1). At the time I was working on the plan I was anticipating 3.1 to release fairly quickly, or at least my part in its release would have trailed off. That didn’t happen and, as is the nature of these things, there hasn’t really been any time for me to work on the kind of rolling improvements the roadmap talks about while we’re trying to ship the next big release of a product. Blockers and bigger ticket items will unfortunately always get in the way.

Releases come in bursts though. My work on 3.5 is basically done and the next big release won’t be for at least half a year, maybe longer. Once I’ve taken a small break I hope to start making progress on the extension manager work again. I think I’m going to work things a little differently. The first thing I will try to do is come up with some good specifications for all of the features. The idea is that if we have good consensus on the details of each then it’ll be easier to get more people working on them in parallel.

Getting a head start on this I’m going to make more public the specification for add-on install hooks…

XULRunner 1.9.1b3 builds, get them while they’re hot

In the process of switching from CVS to Mercurial (and behind the scenes Tinderbox to Buildbot), quite a lot of Mozilla’s build and release systems have had to be updated. Sadly one of the casualties that has yet to be resuscitated are nightly builds of XULRunner on the 1.9.1 branch and trunk. Catlee is now doing some excellent work to get these up and running, but until that gets going here are some semi-official builds using the code matching Firefox 3.1b3. I say semi-official, they were built on regular build slaves using the standard configuration, but just done by hand. I also haven’t tested all of them yet so let me know if you hit any issues, they might be good indicators of issues we’ll see with the nightlies.

Testing the background update checks

Firefox does a fair number of things in the background to help keep things up to date. This includes checking for updates to Firefox itself, checking for updates to add-ons you have installed and checking for updates to a blocklist that disables known unstable add-ons. Normally it does these things quite happily, but for developers and QA, trying to verify that these background tasks are doing what they are supposed to can be annoying. After all who wants to leave Firefox running for a day just to see if it finds a new update?

I’ve written a small extension that helps test these background tasks. It is fairly simple, just gives you a menu option to trigger one of the background checks. It saves delving through preferences and changing the timers to run faster. Most users shouldn’t use it but I figure it is useful for other developers and add-on authors so I’ve put it in the sandbox on AMO and you can go download it from there.